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How To Make The Most Of LinkedIn Endorsements

If you’re on LinkedIn, the social networking site that’s a powerful resource for job hunters, you’ve likely been getting a flurry of emails from the site saying that someone has endorsed you for a skill or expertise. Or when you’ve seen a connection’s LinkedIn profile, you’ve noticed the bold banner asking you to endorse him or her. What to do?

What Are LinkedIn Endorsements?

First, a brief explanation: LinkedIn introduced “endorsements” last September, as a kind of time-starved (or lazy?) professional’s version of LinkedIn “recommendations.”

To endorse someone on LinkedIn, all you need to do is click a box and you’re done. No thinking involved. (Todd Wasserman, marketing editor for the popular digital newsblog Mashable, calls endorsements a Facebook “Like” for business skills.) But with a LinkedIn recommendation, you need to take the time to write a comment.

The no-brainer aspect of endorsements might explain why more than half a billion have already shown up on LinkedIn profiles; users are sending more than 10 million endorsements a day. Every time you accept an endorsement from someone, LinkedIn prompts you to endorse up to four more people.

They Can Be Helpful – and Irritating

LinkedIn endorsements can be a means for discovering how others view you, managing your personal brand online and even starting a conversation. It’s possible they could even make you a stronger job candidate than a competitor.

But they can also be irritants, because each time you log on to LinkedIn or visit a connection’s profile, you may be bombarded with a banner asking you to make an endorsement, with the question: “Does Mary know about X?” And since any of your “first tier” LinkedIn connections can endorse you without adding any explanation, the kudos can become meaningless.

As a career coach who advises clients to get the most out of LinkedIn, I’d like to tell you how to use — and not to use — endorsements:

Don’t automatically accept every endorsement. That’s especially true when you’re endorsed for “skills and expertise” that aren’t on your LinkedIn profile or ones you may not be interested in developing on your next job.

The assets highlighted on LinkedIn should reflect the things you want to do more of, not necessarily the things you are competent at.

Think of your LinkedIn profile, including your endorsements, as a billboard to promote your best work today — the stuff that brings you alive — rather than work you can do handily, but with little enthusiasm.

For example, say someone endorses you for project management, something you’ve done for the last 10 years. But you really don’t want to do it any more, which is why you didn’t list that skill in your LinkedIn profile. In that case, you can choose not to accept the endorsement.

You can also hide an endorsement. (LinkedIn won’t let you delete endorsements.) Here’s how to hide an endorsement: Go to the “Manage Endorsements” link in the Skills and Expertise section of your LinkedIn profile, find the “Project Management” skill and uncheck the box next to the person(s) whose endorsement you want to hide.

Improve your LinkedIn profile by looking for patterns of endorsements that speak to your personal brand. Over time, you’ll notice some of your skills and expertise are receiving a lot of endorsements while others aren’t. This is great market research about your personal brand.

Are people endorsing you for the types of things you want to do and be known for? If not, take the time to promote those abilities.

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Thanks for adding the suggestion of using LinkedIn Endorsements an opportunity to rekindle a relationship. As you mention, LinkedIn is only part of the networking game. Once you rack up a few connections, you need to nurture them through online engagement and offline conversations.

What I’ve discovered is that the concept of endorsement – celebrity, politician, or otherwise, has a lot to do with also understanding the principles of “social proof” and “personal branding,” which are unique to YOU.

You don’t need to be a politician or or the Pepsi company to take advantage of this branding tool to create a stand alone perception for your profile.

“It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.”~Frank I. Luntz

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” ~Henry David Thoreau

“Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot; others transform a yellow spot into the sun.” ~Pablo Picasso

A preference is an idea that differentiates. That’s how you present your skills, personal and technical if you really want to make yourself more valuable to the marketplace..

People that I don’t know are asking me to endorse their expertise!!! I told one of them:”I do not know you at all. It is unprofessional and kind of rude of you to ask me such a thing” He replied:” You are rude to answer me like that”

He said there are many people receiving endorsements like that. I do not trust endorsement then.

Good advice, and especially about building your Endorsements towards what you want to be know for. I have a limited set, and they look to the future, and I in the main just ignore everything outside that set even if I did have the skill in the past.